Downtown Dispatches: Roadrunner games score as downtown attractions

Updated 12:52 am, Saturday, September 8, 2012

With all due respect to high school football, today is when the start of the football season locally becomes the full experience.

UTSA, which beat South Alabama last week on the road, will attempt to take the novel excitement of the team's inaugural season and shape it into tradition today the Roadrunners they play their first home game of the season against Texas A&M-Commerce at the Alamodome.

Before kickoff, the blue and orange-saturated parking lot — grills going, the pigskin being tossed around — is as much a scene as the game itself.

On Thursday, the auspiciousness of UTSA's sophomore season was accompanied by the news that the Roadrunners' Alamodome lease was extended through 2035.

“We found a niche that was missing in the city,” UTSA athletic director Lynn Hickey told the City Council. “We found a hole we needed to fill, so we were really excited to be a part of that.”

It may not be the NFL team for which the Alamodome was built, and these college games won't account for the thousands of Spurs fans that would have circulated through downtown if the AT&T Center had been built here.